by C. P. Snow
‘I don’t know, Aunt Milly,’ I said, ‘but it might be better if I went off by myself.’
‘I never heard of such a thing,’ said Aunt Milly.
‘I don’t want to be in the way,’ I said.
‘That’s for me to settle,’ she said.
She had turned round, her face impassive and pop-eyed, but tinged with indignation. My father was watching with mild interest.
‘I know you’ll put yourself out and never tell us.’ I laughed at her. ‘And take it out of us because you’ve done so.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I should like to come–’
‘Of course you would. Anyone in his sense would,’ said Aunt Milly. ‘You don’t get your board and lodging free everywhere.’
‘As well as a few home truths now and again. It would be very good for us both, wouldn’t it?’
‘It would be very good for you.’
‘I’ve looked forward to it.’
‘I expect you have. Well, I’m ready to have you. I don’t know what all the palaver is about.’
Aunt Milly took words at their face value; to cheek and compliments she returned the same flat, uncompromising rebuff; but sometimes they had just a little effect.
‘Listen, Aunt Milly, I’ll tell you. I expect I shall want to study–’
‘I should think you will,’ she said.
‘That does mean I ought to be on my own, you know.’
‘You can study in my house.’
‘Could you study,’ I said, ‘if you had to share a room with my father – or your brother?’
Aunt Milly was the least humorous of women, and rarely smiled. But she was capable of an enormous hooting laugh. She had also been conditioned to think, all her life, that my father ought to evoke laughter. So she burst into a humourless roar that echoed round the kitchen. My father obligingly burst into a snatch of song, then pretended to snore.
‘One of the two,’ he said with his clowning grin. ‘One of the two. That’s me, that is.’
‘Stop it, Bertie,’ said Aunt Milly implacably.
My father, still clowning, shrank into a corner.
The argument went on. I was ready to stick it out all night. I was as obstinate as she was, but that she did not know. I played all the tricks I could: I flattered her, I was impertinent, I stood up to denunciation, I gave vague hints of how I thought of living.
Those hints made her voice grow louder, her eyes more staring and glazed. I proposed to go into lodgings, did I – and how was I going to pay for them out of a clerk’s earnings? I described what I thought my budget would be.
‘You’re not leaving yourself any margin,’ she retorted.
‘I’ve got a little money in the bank now, you know,’ I said. I had been careless to speak so. It might have provoked a storm, about bankruptcy, my father’s debts, my duty. She would not have been restrained because my father was present. But it happened that my mother, before she died, had made her promise not to deter me from ‘taking my chance’. Aunt Milly prided herself on having dispensed with ‘superstitious nonsense’ – for after all this was the twentieth century, as she asserted in every quarrel with my mother. She would have said that she paid no special reverence to deathbed promises. If she kept this one, she would have said, it was because she always kept her word.
‘I won’t say what I think of that,’ said Aunt Milly, with a thunderous exertion of self-control. Then she indulged in one, but only one, loud cry of rage: ‘No wonder this family will come to a bad end.’
The evening became night. To say that she gave in would not be true; but she acknowledged my intention, though with a very bad grace. To say that I had got so far without hurting her would be nonsense. We were set on aims that contradicted each other; they could not be reconciled, and no gloss on earth could make them so. But at least in Aunt Milly’s understanding we had not split or parted. She did not consider it a break. I had promised to go and have tea at her house each Sunday afternoon.
It was a warm, wet evening late in May when I first went as a lodger to my room in Lower Hastings Street. The room was at the top of the house, and was no larger than my attic at home. From the window I looked over slate roofs, the roofs of outhouses and sheds, glistening in the rain. Beyond, there was a cloud of sulphurous smoke, where a train was disappearing through a tunnel into the station yard.
I had brought all my possessions in two old suitcases – another suit, two pairs of flannels, some underclothes, a few books and school photographs. I left them on the floor, and stood by the window, looking over the roofs, my heart quickening with a tumult of emotions. I felt despondent in the strange, cheerless room, and yet hopeful with the hope that I saw so often in my mother; anxious, desperately anxious that I might have chosen wrong, and at the same time ultimately confident; lonely and also free.
There was everything in the world to do. There was everything in front of me, everything to do – yet what was I to do that moment, with an evening stretching emptily ahead? Should I lie on my bed and read? Or should I walk the streets of the town, alone, in the warm wet night?
Part Two
Towards a Gamble
11: Discontent and Talks of Love
During the summer after my mother’s death I used to walk to the office in the warm and misty mornings; there was a smell of rain freshening the dusty street, and freshening my hopes as well, as I walked along, chafing at another wasted day ahead.
I ticked off names, names written in violet ink that glared on the squared paper. I read each date of birth, and underlined in red those born before 31 August 1908. I gazed down into the sunlit street, and my mind was filled with plans and fancies, with hope and the first twist of savage discontent. My plans were half-fancies still, not much grown up since my first days in the office, when I walked round the town hall square at lunchtime and dreamed that I had suddenly come into a fortune. I still made resolutions about what to read, or what prospectus to write for next, with an elation and sense of purpose that continued to outshine the unromantic act of carrying the resolution out. But there was some change. I had my legacy. I was angry that I could not see my way clear, I was angry that no one gave advice that sounded ambitious enough. Gazing down, watching the tramcars glitter in the sun, waiting with half an ear for Mr Vesey’s cry of complaint, I began to suffer the ache and burn of discontent.
Yet I was sidetracked and impeded by that same discontent. There were days when the office walls hemmed me in, when Mr Vesey became an incarnate insult, when I was choking with hurt pride, when Darby in all kindness gave me grey and cautious advice. Those were the days when I felt I must be myself, break out, not in the planned-for distant future, but now, before I rusted away, now, while my temper was hot.
It was a temptation then to show off, get an audience by any means I could, and at that age I could not resist the temptation. I scarcely even thought of trying, it seemed so natural and I got so fierce a pleasure. I had a quick, cruel tongue, and I enjoyed using it. It seemed natural to find myself at the ILP, getting myself elected on to committees, making inflammatory speeches in lecture halls all over the town. Only the zealots attended in the height of summer, but I was ready to burst out, even before a handful of the converted, and still be elated and warm-tempered as we left the dingy room at ten o’clock of a midsummer evening and found ourselves blinking in the broad daylight. The town was not large enough for one to stay quite anonymous, and some of my exploits got round. A bit of gossip even reached Aunt Milly, and the next Sunday, when I visited her house for tea, she was not backward in expressing her disapproval.
To myself, I could not laugh that attack away as cheerfully as I did most of Aunt Milly’s. I was practical enough to know that I was doing nothing ‘useful’. As I strolled to my lodgings (‘my rooms’, I used to call them to my acquaintances, with a distinct echo of my mother, despite my speeches on the equality of man) late on those summer nights, I had moments of bleak lucidity. Wher
e was I getting to? What was I doing with my luck? Was I so devoid of will, was I just going to drift? Those moments struck cold, after the applause I had won a few hours earlier with some sarcastic joke.
But once on my feet again, with faces in front of me, or distracted in a different fashion by Jack Cotery and his talk of girls, I was swept away. My own chilling questions were just insistent enough to keep me going regularly to the law classes at the School, and that was all. I intended to get to know George Passant, and I may have had some half-thought that his advice would be grander than that of Darby and the rest; but my first expectations were forgotten for ever, in the light of what actually happened. I had not, however, forced myself into his notice before the School closed for the summer holidays. Occasionally I saw him from my office window, for the firm of Eden and Martineau occupied a floor on the other side of Bowling Green Street. On many mornings I watched George Passant cross over the tramlines, wearing a bowler hat tilted back on his head, carrying a briefcase, swinging a heavy walking stick. I was due at nine, and he used to cross the street with extreme punctuality half an hour later.
All that summer, when I was not what Aunt Milly denounced as ‘gassing’, I spent lazy lotos-eating evenings in the company of Jack Cotery. At school he had been too precocious for me; now he was a clerk in the accounts branch of a local newspaper, he ate his sandwiches at midday in the same places as I did, and we drifted together. He had become a powerfully built young man, still short but over-muscled; he had the comedian’s face that I remembered, fresh, lively, impudent, wistful. His large ardent eyes shone out of his comedian’s face, and his voice was soft and modulated, surprisingly soft to come from that massive chest and throat. He was eighteen, a few months my senior; and he was intoxicated by anything that could come under the name of love. In that soft and modulated voice he talked of girls, women, romance, passion, the delights of the flesh, the incredible attraction of a woman he had seen in the tram that morning, the wonderful prospect of tracking her down, the delights not only of the flesh but of first hearing her voice, the delight that the world was so made that, as long as we lived, the perfume of love would be scattered through the air.
It was talk that I was ready and eager to hear. Not primarily because of the interest of Jack himself, though, when I could break through the dreams his talk induced, he was fun in his own right. In his fashion, he was kind and imaginative. It had been like him, even as a boy, to try to console me on that shameful morning of the ten-shilling note. When one was in his company, he lavished all his good nature, flattering and sweet as honey.
But he was the most unreliable of friends.
He was also a natural romancer. It came to him, as easy as breathing, to add to, to enhance, to transmogrify the truth. As a boy he had boasted – utterly untruthfully – how his father had plenty of money. And now ‘I’m on the evening paper,’ he could not resist saying, when someone asked his job, and proceeded – from the nucleus of fact that he worked in the newspaper office – to draw a picture of his daily life, as a hard drinking, dashing, unstoppable journalist. He had enough of a romancer’s tact to point out that the glamour of the journalist’s occupation had been grossly overdrawn. He shrugged his shoulders like a disillusioned professional.
It was the same with his stories of his conquests. He had much success with women, even while he was still a boy. If he had stuck to the facts, he would have evoked the admiration, the envious admiration, of all his companions, me among them. But the facts were too prosaic for Jack. He was impelled to elaborate stories of how a young woman, obviously desirable, obviously rich and well-born, had come into the office and caught his eye; how she had come in, on one pretext after another, morning after morning; how in the end she had stopped beside his desk, and dropped a note asking him to meet her in the town; how she had driven him in her own car into the country, where they had enjoyed a night of perfect bliss under the stars. ‘Uncomfortable at times, clearly,’ said Jack, with his romancer’s knack of adding a note of comic realism.
He knew that I did not believe a word of it. I was amused by him and fond of him, and I envied his impudence and confidence with women, and of course his success. Chiefly, though, he carried with him a climate in which, just at that time, I wanted to bask; because he was so amorous, because everything he said was full of hints, revelations, advice, fantasies, reminiscences, forecasts, all of love, he brought out and magnified much that I was ready to feel.
For at this stage in our youth we can hold two kinds of anticipation of love, which seem contradictory and yet coexist and reinforce each other. We can dream, delicately because even to imagine it is to touch one of the most sacred of our hopes, of searching for the other part of ourselves, of the other being who will make us whole, of the ultimate and transfiguring union. At the same time we can gloat over any woman, become insatiably curious about the brute facts of the pleasures which we are then learning or which are just to come. In that phase we are coarse and naked, and anyone who has forgotten his youth will judge that we are too tangled with the flesh ever to forget ourselves in the ecstasy of romantic love. But in fact, at this stage in one’s youth, the coarseness and nakedness, the sexual preoccupations, the gloating over delights to come, are – in the secret heart where they take place – themselves romantic. They are a promise of joy. Much that Jack Cotery and I said to each other would have been repulsive to a listener who forgot that we were eighteen. The conversations would not stand the light of day. Yet at the time they drove from my mind both the discontents and the ambitions. They enriched me as much as my hope, my anticipation, of transfiguring love.
12: Pride at a Football Match
Autumn came, and I was restless, full of expectation. The School reopened. In the bright September nights I walked down the Newarke to George Passant’s classes, full of a kind of new-year elation and resolve. Going back to my lodgings under the misty autumn moon, I wondered about the group that Passant was collecting round him. They were all students at the School, some of whom I knew by name; young women who attended an occasional class, one or two youths who were studying full-time for an external London degree. They gathered round him at the end of the evening, and moved noisily back into the town.
Their laughter rang provocatively loud as they jostled along, a compact group, on the other side of the road. I felt left out. I was chagrined that George Passant had never asked me to join them. I felt very lonely.
Not long afterwards I took my chance and forced myself upon him. It happened in October, a week after my eighteenth birthday. I had come out of the office late. There, on the pavement ten yards ahead, George Passant was walking deliberately with his heavy tread, whistling and swinging his stick.
I caught him up and fell into step beside him. He said good evening with amiable, impersonal cordiality. I said that it was curious we had not met before, since we worked on opposite sides of the street. George agreed that it was. He was half-abstracted, half-shy; I was too intent to mind. He knew my name, he knew that I attended his class. That was not enough. I was going to cut a dash. We passed the reference library, and I referred airily to the hours I spent there, the amount of reading I had done in the last few months; I expounded on Freud, Jung, Adler, Tolstoy, Marx, Shaw. We came to a little bookshop at the corner of Belvoir Street. The lights in the shop window shone on glossy jackets, the jackets of the best sellers of the day, A S M Hutchinson and P C Wren and Michael Arlen, with some copies of The Forsyte Saga in an honourable position on the right.
‘What can you do?’ I demanded of George Passant. ‘If that’s what you give people to read?’ I waved my arm at the window. ‘If that’s what they’re willing to take? I don’t suppose there’s a volume of poetry in the shop. Yeats is one of the greatest poets of the age, and you couldn’t go into that shop and buy a single word of his.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know anything about poetry,’ said George Passant, quickly and defensively, in the tone of a man without an ounce of blague in his wh
ole nature. ‘I’m afraid it’s no use expecting me to give an opinion about poetry.’ Then he said: ‘We ought to have a drink on it, anyway. I take it you know the pubs of this town better than I do. Let’s go somewhere where we shan’t be cluttered up with the local bell-wethers.’
I was bragging, determined to make an impression, roaring ahead without much care of what he thought. George Passant was five years older, and many men of his age would have been put off. But George’s nerves were not grated by raw youth. In a sense, he was perpetually raw and young himself. Partly because of his own diffidence, partly because of his warm, strong fellow feeling, he took to me as we stood outside the bookshop. Shamelessly I lavished myself in a firework display of boasting, and he still took to me.
We sat by the fire at the Victoria. When we arrived, it was early enough for us to have the room to ourselves: later it filled, but we still kept the table by the fire. George sat opposite me, his face flushed by the heat, his voice always loud, growing in volume with each pint he drank. He paid for all the beer, stood the barmaids a drink and several of the customers. ‘I believe in establishing friendly relations. We shall want to come back here. This is a splendid place,’ George confided to me, with preternatural worldly wisdom and a look of extreme cunning: while in fact he was standing treat because he was happy, relaxed, off his guard, exhilarated, and at home.
It was a long time that night before I stopped roaring ahead with my own self-advertisement. The meeting mattered to me – I knew that while living in it, though I did not know how much. I was impelled to go on making an impression. It was a long time before I paid any attention to George.
At close quarters, his face had one or two surprises. The massive head was as impressive as in the lecture room. The great forehead, the bones of the jaw under the blanket of heavy flesh – they were all as I expected. But I was surprised, having only seen him tense and concentrated, to realize that he could look so exuberantly relaxed. As he drank, he softened into sensual content. And I was more surprised to catch his eyes, just for a moment, in repose. His whole being that night exuded power, and happiness, and excitement at having someone with whom to match his wits. He smacked his lips after each tankard, and billowed with contented laughter. But there was one interval, perhaps only a minute long, when each of us was quiet. It was the only silent time between us, all that night. George had put his tankard down, and was staring past me, down the room and into vacant space. His eyes were large, blue, set in deep orbits; in excitement they flashed, but for that moment they were mournful and lost.